


Fruit Ninja

by rebelmeg



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Avengers Family, Avengers Tower, Bucky Barnes & Natasha Romanov Friendship, Domestic Avengers, Fluff and Crack, Fruit, Gen, The not-kinky kind of knife play
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-05
Updated: 2019-01-05
Packaged: 2019-10-04 19:10:55
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,028
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17310239
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rebelmeg/pseuds/rebelmeg
Summary: When Russian assassins can't sleep, they get up to Russian assassin shenanigans.  Also known as, real life fruit ninja.





	Fruit Ninja

**Author's Note:**

> I have no reason behind this, it's just been lurking in my bits and pieces document for awhile and since I'm up anyway... *shrugs* The very lovely [LadyMaya](https://archiveofourown.org/users/LadyMaya) was my wonderful beta for this nonsense!

It was four in the morning, and Natasha wasn’t surprised that the light was already on in the communal kitchen in the Tower. It was a common occurrence in a tower full of semi-stable lunatics that avenged for a living.

It was Bucky in there this time, standing at the island counter and neatly slicing a mango. Or, well, it looked like his fourth mango at least, he had a bowl next to him that he was transferring the slices into.

“Can’t sleep?” She asked, propping the fridge open and staring at the contents.

“Nah. Hands are antsy.”

“Good thing you’re showing those mangos who’s boss.”

Bucky did a little salute with his knife, then dispatched the slices into the bowl, and worked on skinning the next mango.

Smirking a little bit, Natasha pulled a blade from the waist of her pajama pants and waited for Bucky to put the mango down before lobbing the knife in a perfect arc. It landed precisely where she intended, and the mango rolled to its side with the blade sticking out of it.

Bucky leveled a flat look at her over his shoulder, raising one eyebrow. “What did that mango ever do to you?”

Smirking just a little bit smugly, Natasha turned back to the fridge and was contemplating leftovers or something slightly more healthy when the knife Bucky had been slicing mangos with landed with a solid _thwip_ , buried in a stick of butter.

She glanced back at him, seeing the little grin on his face as he continued slicing mangos with her knife.

Alright. Playtime.

Selecting a box of strawberries and pulling Bucky’s knife out of the butter, Natasha closed the fridge and went around to the other side of the island. Popping it open, she held up a berry for Bucky to see, then tossed it at him.

With a matching grin, he flicked her knife out and effortlessly lopped the fluffy green top off the strawberry. He scooted the top aside into his pile of mango peels, then tossed the strawberry back at her. She sliced it cleanly in half, the two pieces falling onto the counter.

“You ever play the game Fruit Ninja, Barnes?”

“Thought I was.”

It was a game then, the two of them tossing strawberries back and forth until the box was empty, then turning all the mango slices into mango chunks. The countertop and part of the floor was littered with chopped fruit, but that didn’t stop them from working their way through a bunch of bananas, a box of blueberries, several apples, a pineapple, a bag of plums, both red and green grapes, and a few fuzzy kiwis.

Clint, probably lured by the ESP he had that was tuned in to chaos, made himself known by way of a blowgun dart shot out of the ceiling vent that intercepted a blueberry Natasha was aiming for. After a few choice swear words in Russian from her, and a vent chuckle from him, the fruit slicing continued.

Steve walked in an hour after that, rolling his eyes as he collected a handful of banana and strawberry halves off the counter and left.

A few minutes later, Bruce shuffled in looking for tea, took one look at them, then turned around and walked right back out, calling over his shoulder, “Leave my dragon fruit alone or I’m gonna come after you.”

When Tony wandered in, bed-rumpled and still in pajamas, his eyes weren’t even open and he walked straight through the chaos going on around him without flinching. Bucky and Natasha were doing a frenzy round, as Clint had just announced from the ceiling, and they were taking it very seriously as they swore at each other in Russian and kept trying to hit each other’s blades out of the air while throwing fruit at each other probably more viciously than was necessary. Tony collected his coffee and a muffin apparently without noticing anything amiss before trudging back out again, his feet shuffling through the fruit on the floor as blades and fruit chunks flew by his head. He even got a few flecks of fruit and juice in his hair, but his eyes remained closed and he all but sleep-walked out.

The fun ended shortly thereafter, when Thor, eager to join the festivities, hurled Mjolnir right through the thick of it, shouting jovially, “For Asgard!” The hammer obliterated several fruits, one of Clint’s darts, and one of Natasha’s knives. He ran the second she turned a glare at him, summoning Mjolnir after him.

Sam arrived to pick up Steve for their morning run just after Thor left, bearing a bag of breakfast burritos, and his jaw and the burritos all but fell to the floor when he saw the disaster.

“What the hell are you doing?!”

Natasha looked at him like he was being particularly stupid as she scooped a handful of fruit into the abandoned mango bowl, utterly ignoring the flecks of fruit sticking to her hair and skin. “Fruit salad.”

* * *

Team dinner that night was held outside, Steve and Clint manning a huge grill loaded with hamburgers and hotdogs while everyone else brought something to contribute. Bruce brought limonada suica, a kind of creamy Brazilian limeade, Tony brought chips he’d picked up on the way home from a meeting, Sam brought a big pot of his mom’s recipe of baked beans, and Thor had googled traditional American barbecue food and had made some really tasty potato salad.

Natasha and Bucky both brought out a big bowl of cut fruit, setting them on either end of the food table. Tony had invited Rhodey over, since he was in town, and the guy looked at the big bowl of cut fruit as he loaded his plate, his eyebrows knitting. 

“That is… the most artistically disastrous fruit salad I’ve ever seen. None of these pieces are even the same size.”

Bucky shrugged and put a serving spoon in his bowl (distinguishable from Natasha’s because he hadn’t bothered to peel his banana slices). “It’s hard to do when you’re cutting things midair.”

“Why were you cutting—You know what, nope, I don’t even wanna know.”


End file.
